Xbox 360 Elite cracked open, guts exposed

When the guys at Llamma got their hands on an Xbox 360 Elite some ten days before the (already broken) street date, they gutted it quicker than Han slicing open a tauntaun. Their first notable discovery: the Hitachi GDR-3120L DVD drive. To be honest, we expected to see the newer (and "super-quiet") BenQ VAD6038 but the guys at Llamma poo-poo our desires claiming, "... there are no flashing utilities available [for the BenQ] at the moment so there is no ability to replace the DVD drive or use this as a parts motherboard." Sure, we were just hoping for a quieter drive though. They continue.

Like divorcing Han Solo from his carbonite tomb, the bounty hunters at Llamma pulled the new and improved motherboard from its black shell and proceeded to pore over its silicon surface, documenting every facet and imagining what it would look like in golden bikini. What did they discover here? First, what appears to be a quick-n-dirty fix for the RROD: some epoxy around the CPU and GPU. The big question: while both chips are different revisions from the current models, they can't be certain if this indicates a die-shrink to the 65nm promised land though they state there's a "good possibility" it does. Remember, Microsoft's Albert Pinello told us the Elite would use the "same components" as the existing Xbox 360 consoles, so we're gonna wait for a definitive answer on this one.